Tapes: Witness unsure about murder trial evidence

Published: Wednesday, June 19, 2013 at 6:36 p.m.

Last Modified: Wednesday, June 19, 2013 at 6:36 p.m.

SARASOTA - A key witness in a double murder trial was not sure the weapon she had been asked to identify was indeed the murder weapon and felt like prosecutors were picking on her for not cooperating, according to recordings of phone calls she made from jail that were released Wednesday.

Facts

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Dorothy “Dotty” Stolte was jailed for five days by prosecutors during the March trial of John Lee Allen, who was eventually convicted of murdering his girlfriend and a neighbor. Prosecutor Karen Fraivillig said she had to jail Stolte, 64 and suffering from poor health, to ensure she would testify in the trial. But Stolte and her attorney, in a motion seeking a mistrial, have said the jailing was a form of intimidation to get Stolte to say what Fraivillig wanted.

“I couldn't say it was the murder weapon like she wanted to say, because I don't know,” Stolte, referring to Fraivillig, told her brother during a phone call from the Sarasota County jail. “She said that without me she didn't have a case.”

Stolte also said she felt Fraivillig was pressuring her to testify in a way that would help the prosecution, the recorded phone calls show.

“I said, ‘You're not going to get the answers out of me that you want, I can't say that. You know, why can't you pick on someone else?' ” Stolte said in one jail call, recounting her conversation with prosecutors.

The four recorded jail calls have been entered as evidence in Lee's case, dragging the credibility and reputations of Stolte, other witnesses, prosecutors, public defenders and law enforcement into a hearing later this summer for Circuit Judge Peter Dubensky to determine if there should be a mistrial.

Lee's attorney, Assistant Public Defender Carolyn Schlemmer, filed a motion asking for a new trial, including allegations the prosecution misled the judge to sign the arrest order for Stolte, an Englewood resident.

Prosecutors say the recordings show that Stolte admitted to her brother that she bought that knife for Lee, 49, as a Christmas gift, that she would not appear at trial and that if forced to testify she would claim that she could not remember. Fraivillig, the assistant state attorney who has become the center of the allegations, has called Stolte a “hostile witness” whose claims are “baseless.”

A key witness

The disputes surround Lee, his girlfriend and a neighbor. In 2011, Lee was charged with the murders of Traci Nabergall and neighbor Jason Salter. Lee was living with his girlfriend in a home that Stolte owned with her brother on Park Road in Venice, to occupy and protect the home.

With DNA washed from the knife after it was fished from a storm drain, Stolte was a critical witness for prosecutors' efforts to establish it as the murder weapon. Lee had also told a friend he threw the knife in a drain after the murders, prosecutors said.

In her first statements to detectives, Stolte told them she gave Lee an on-sale pocketknife and compass kit she bought from Lowe's and was worried it was the knife he used to kill.

She also told detectives she feared Lee would come after her sister, a previous girlfriend. Stolte has known Lee for 20 years and he is the father of Stolte's niece.

Lee was convicted for both deaths in a March trial, after a September 2012 mistrial during jury selection. Schlemmer argued in court that evidence indicates that Lee killed Salter in self-defense after discovering the man had murdered his girlfriend.

With the murder weapon and a Christmas gift at the center of the controversy, Stolte was called to testify and then jailed for reportedly refusing to show up in court.